8 Things to do before you start working on that Product Job

Hi reader, if you are a first-time product manager or you are a fresh hiree waiting for your first product assignment in the company, then this blog can help you to understand what are the first 8 things you need to do before you start working on your first product assignment

1. Understand the existing products

Get to know all the existing products that the company uses to run its business. Do not limit yourself to the product that you will be handling, because mostly your product will be integrated with the other products and even if they are not, you might find product optimization opportunities in doing so.

Go through all the user flows and try to empathize with the user when you do so, this will help you in spotting existing flaws in the product.

Understand the system design of the product(s) and ask for sessions with the Tech team in charge for understanding this. Read as many PRDs and Tech Documents while you are acquainting yourself with the product(s), this will help you to enhance your understanding one step further

Now, what happens if you’ve joined a startup that does not have any tech product yet? but is planning to build it soon and that’s the reason you have been hired as well. In this case, understand how the company is providing its services to the customers using the current set of tools and framework. Observe the business operations closely, ask questions and take notes

2. Align yourself with the business goals

Get to know the business goals of the company and ask why these are the business goals. It is very crucial to understand the inspiration and vision of the company, and knowing what the company goals are and why they were chosen can tell you the direction in which the company wants to build itself. This can help you set objectives for the company if you think they miss out on any. Also, understand how they are measuring their success (metrics) and how is the performance of these metrics

3. Know your stakeholders

Before you start working on any product, it is very important to know the stakeholders, because oftentimes you will find yourself interacting with these stakeholders for your product requirements, or sharing updates with them, or taking approvals on PRDs and Prototypes. Therefore it is a really good idea to get introduced to them beforehand and fairly interact with them so that you are not stuck in the middle of a product/feature development work.

Get to know all the important stakeholders in the company (founders, department heads/senior managers, POCs for products from the business side), ask for introductions from your HR or reporting manager. When you interact with them, try to get information on:

1. What are their expectations from the Product & Tech team?
2. What are the problems they and their team are facing with the current set of products?
3. Were there any solutions provided for these problems, if yes what were they, and then what happened?
4. Currently, what are the big goals they are chasing, and how they are trying to achieve them?

This interaction can turn out a bit tough, where stakeholders can go on a rant of blaming the product team for not providing a good product. But as a product manager, you have to see opportunities in despair and treat your stakeholders as users of your product.

In such cases, always hear out your stakeholders, remember they are trying to tell you that they are frustrated so that you can help them by solving the issues. Treat all feedback without any emotion and do not get defensive when your stakeholders are sharing feedback. Instead, try to understand the real problem. Oftentimes people complain of the symptoms but they do not know the actual disease. Just like doctors, we product managers have to understand the real problem behind the symptom they are complaining and that will help us to come up with an optimal solution for the problem.

4. Learn the Product Roadmap

Take a look at the existing Product Roadmap to understand the key problems that the product is trying to solve and how they are solving them, Goals/OKRs of the product, prioritization.

Product Roadmap could be difficult to read and understand, but take a look and ask someone in your team to take you through it, which would give you an opportunity to ask clarifying questions as well

5. Understand the existing development process

It is absolutely important to understand the product development process in your company. Talk to your Tech Leads and your product team to understand if the company follows the Agile method or Waterfall method. Understand the team structures and how the development work is assigned, tracked, reviewed, tested, and deployed. Understand at what stage estimated timelines are shared by the tech team and how the team handles delays or failures.

Make yourself familiar with any task management tool like Jira, Trello, ClickUp, etc that your team could be using. Also, get to know all the documentation work that needs to be done for development work, e.g. — PRDs, Tech Documentations, QA Documents, Release Documents, Product Manuals, and anything else that your company could be following

6. Get to know your team

Knowing your team and team structure is absolutely top of the list. Get to know the people you are going to work with on a daily basis. A product manager collaborates with and influences people in the workplace with their information, ideas, methods, and product vision. Therefore, the first step is to know your team, understand who they are, their experiences, and their approach towards work.

Understand, what they think about the product, what problems they see here, what solutions they want to implement. Get to know them as people, their thought process about product development, and what they expect from their colleagues and team. Usually, your close team would include product, tech, design, UX, QA, support depending on your company structure

7. Meet your users

It is a great idea to meet a few users of your product right in the beginning itself. This would give you insight into the users, how they use your product, and what are some of the issues they are facing with the product.

You don’t need to meet a lot of users, just 3 users is a good number to get these insights. Take help from your UX team or some of your product folks to get you the contact details of a few frequent users of your product. Arrange a meet-up with them, either in-person if possible or over Zoom or Google Hangout. Try to do these when you meet them:

1. Understand their day to day life, what work they do and how they solve their regular problems
2. From when they are using the product and why they started using it?
3. What other products do they use to solve the same problems?
4. What problems do they face with your product and how they solve it then?
5. What are some of their favorite apps/digital products and why?
6. Ask them to do a task using your product. The task should be one of the main user flows in the product that the user should be doing regularly. Observe them closely when they do this task, take note of the user frustrations, doubts, issues you notice while they do this task

It is important that you make the users feel comfortable before you start the session. Tell them that you are not doing this to test their knowledge of the product at all, and it is for research purposes only. If required you can also provide a confidentiality agreement to your users mentioning that the research information will be kept strictly confidential and for product improvement purposes only

Also, it is also very important to respect the user's time and effort and hence plan for thank you token in the form of a gift voucher or cash that you can hand over to the user once they have finished the session. This will also help you to get the users to readily sign-up for the session and they will be happy to answer all your questions. Keep a fixed duration for the session and make sure you do not exceed the time duration. Appreciate your users for their time and feedback once you end the session

8. Document it all

Documentation is one of the most regular and important tasks of a product manager’s job. If you are a PM, you will be documenting almost every piece of information you get. So, it goes without saying that you need to document all your observations, conversations, research, and information that you gather in this initial duration before you have started working on that product assignment yet. Document it well, in a structured manner, which would be easy for you to refer back at any point in time and you should also keep updating this document as and when you receive more information. This document can become an absolute Handbook for you about the company, its Vision, OKRs, Stakeholders, Team profile, Team structure, User Personas, and much more

Do these eight things and you will be knowing more about the company, product, users, and its problems than most of the existing team members. This is something you should definitely do in the beginning and then keep updating yourself on these topics frequently, and along with it update your document as well. This is the first stepping stone that will set you up for success as a Product Manager. So don’t wait for it, just go ahead and do it!